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NATURE AND MANKIND

"People are a more vivid reminder than anything else in creation of God's existence, His mystery, and His creative power. If man really is fashioned, more than anything else, in the image of God, then it clearly follows that there is nothing on earth so near to God as a human being. The conclusion is inescapable, that to be in the presence of even the meanest, lowliest, most repulsive specimen of humanity in the world is still to be closer to God than when looking up into a starry sky or at a beautiful sunset...The wonders of nature touch only remotely on love by comparison with the wonders of human relationships, healed and restored... We cannot really "love" a sunset, we can only love a person. If we can be said to love things in nature at all, it is only by a sort of analogy with the love we bear for one another, and supremely for God himself."

-Mike Mason

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WAIT

"Wait; be strong and take heart and wait."

If there is anything we don’t like to do, it’s wait. There is something purifying about remaining strong in tough times and remaining faithful when ill winds blow.

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THE POWER OF SPIRITUAL ESSENCE
-excerpted and adapted from Leo Tolstoy’s essay, “The Lion and The Honeycomb”

Men and women are both spiritual and animal beings. One can move a person either by influencing their animal being or by influencing their spiritual essence. In the same way, one can change the time on a clock either by moving the hands or by moving the main wheel. And just as it is better to change the time by moving the inner mechanism, so it is better to move a person- whether oneself or another person-by influencing their consciousness.

And just as one must take special care of the part of the clock which most easily moves the inner mechanism, so one must take special care of the clarity and purity of the consciousness which moves a person. All this is indisputable and everyone knows it; what we must consider, however, is our need to deceive ourselves. What people most want is not that their consciousness should work correctly; it is that their actions should appear to them to be just. It is for this end that we often use substances [such as drugs and alcohol] which distract and disturb the correct working of our consciousness.

In order to grasp the full significance of this clouding of consciousness, carefully remember the state of your soul at each period of your life. You will find that at each period of your life, you were confronted by several moral dilemmas, and that your well-being depended on correctly resolving these dilemmas. (Should I lie, should I cheat…) The resolution of such dilemmas requires a degree of attention requiring true labour. In any labour, especially at the beginning, there comes a time when the work seems painfully difficult, and our human weakness prompts us to abandon it. Physical labour seems painful at the beginning; intellectual labour all the more so.

People have a tendency to stop thinking when it first becomes difficult, but thinking becomes fruitful. Answers to life’s questions demands labour, which can sometimes be painful. If we did not have distractions, we could drive the answers out of our consciousness! However, we naturally want to avoid pain and therefore, we avoid the very answers we are seeking! Often months, even years can pass us by without positively moving forward to find our answers. Yet, it is the resolution of moral questions that constitutes the movement of life. Often we remain ignorant of this, living a contradictory view of life, unable to break the wall down that prevents us from finding the answers we seek.

[Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), author of ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Anna Karenina’ is ranked as a great writer and thinker. He was born into a wealthy Russian landowning family and was a child when his parents died. Relatives raised him. He became a soldier and served on the Danube front in the Crimean War. Tolstoy’s love for common peasants led him to build a school on his estate; he traveled through Europe to learn the latest educational theories. Tolstoy himself went through a spiritual crisis which led him to Christianity in 1879. He became more preoccupied with moral questions and chose to give as a simple peasant and give his possessions away.]

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HEART

"But GOD told Samuel, "Looks aren't everything. Don't be impressed with his looks and stature. I've already eliminated him. GOD judges persons differently than humans do. Men and women look at the face; GOD looks into the heart."
I Samuel 16:7

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